Small Cell

Electromag Wireless Solution

Electromag Wireless Solution is building a reputation worldwide as an accessible team

of experienced RF systems design engineers.

By Janice Hoppe-Spiers

Electromag Wireless Solution has built a strong portfolio over the past four years to become recognized as the worldwide knowledge leader in designing wireless communication capabilities in both indoor and outdoor applications. “We work as an extension of our clients’ teams, allowing them to focus on their core activities by taking over the design work,” Global Operations Lead Achueth Radhakrishnan says. “We have a strong technical team and have provided system design services for high-profile projects all over the world, which gives our clients confidence that we can turn projects around quickly and provide the attention to detail that they require.”

Entrepreneur and seasoned business executive Rony Stephen founded Electromag in 2014 to help clients develop a competitive advantage in their respective markets by providing quicker project delivery and a scalable cost-effective resource solution for their DAS system design needs. Electromag specializes in in-building DAS design services utilizing proprietary tools, as well as popular tools such as iBwave, employing a range of technology types (passive/active/hybrid) and multiple equipment makes.

Since then, the company has grown to partner with OEMs like Nokia Siemens, Whoop Wireless and Katherine. “We work with well-known system integrators in Australia and the United States to complete hospitals, high-rise towers, entertainment and convention centers, university buildings and campuses, public transportation facilities, retail spaces and commercial facilities,” says Apoorv Bapat, vice president of client relations.

To date, the company has designed and provided support for more than 315 sites and designed and documented more than 700 million square feet of DAS and small cell globally from its offices in Sydney, Australia, and Bangalore, India. The company is now focused on building a stronger presence in the United States and will open an office in the country as demand for its services increases.

Expert Staff

Since day one, Electromag has hired experienced RF engineers to ensure that its team is able to effectively communicate and work with its clients. The company’s experienced RF engineers and account managers ensure that project needs are met and that its customer’s expectations are exceeded at all times.

“We are also big on attitude and look for people who are willing to learn,” Stephen says. “We want our staff to project themselves as knowledge leaders and you get that way by investing in a team who believes they are. We are particular about the kind of people we hire because they are a reflection of Electromag.”

Electromag invests in people with technical expertise who are experienced and strong team players. This is a key reason why it has chosen to hire account managers who have completed their technical education in either the United States or Australia. In doing so, the company knows its customers are well looked after by a team member that can successfully navigate the cultural nuances and in turn, create an easy rapport between both teams.

Close Coordination

Electromag understands that its clients work in a project-based environment and finding the right team size is critical and often challenging. The company helps its clients deal with the up-cycle by being the extended team that understands and creates the outputs the same way as them, when needed. Electromag reliably handles all aspects of the detailed design and documentation, taking on the responsibility of maintaining a high level of quality in the deliverables for its clients.

For example, one of Australia’s largest system integrators recently partnered with Electromag to streamline their design and approval process for faster outputs. “Our partner approached us with the problem of their RF design engineers having a hard time balancing the need to be on-site doing preliminary analysis of the DAS sites, assessing the feasibility of the new DAS they had to propose and the responsibility to turn around a full design document,” Radhakrishnan remembers. “This was clearly becoming a bottleneck for their throughput.”

The system integrator selected Electromag as an extension of their design team and restructured their team to have fewer RF engineers and more project managers on-site. “This move enabled our client’s RF engineers to gather input and do a preliminary analysis based on a site visit, and transfer that data to the design team [Electromag] and only have to review it prior to sending out for approval to the carriers,” Head of RF Services Santhosh Hiremath explains. “Electromag was happy to invest in this process by having a member of our team in the partner’s office during this transition, so we get the processes, requirement gathering, information transfer, design standards and all the minor details right from the beginning.”

Having Electromag as part of the team not only freed up the engineers on project teams, but also the engineering manager. The client now had the help of Electromag’s dedicated account managers, which meant they were no longer bogged down with hands-on design delivery work. The engineering manager could now take on a much more strategic role of managing their customer, focus on improving throughput and be available to personally meet customers without worry of work being delayed.

A mutual goal between the system integrator and Electromag was to be one single unit as opposed to being viewed as an external contractor. “For our partners, this was an important objective during the change process,” Bapat says. “For Electromag, this is a logical extension of a core ideal that we work to promote in our business and culture empathy. Electromag has time and again gone the extra mile when needed to help our partner deliver high-quality work, sometimes within really strict timeframes.”

With such close coordination and a staff available in multiple time zones, Electromag is able to provide its clients with around-the-clock productivity. Last year, for example, Electromag completed the design of an i-DAS project for a high-rise in Florida during the Christmas holiday season. “Our customer could directly move to the commissioning phase on returning from the holidays,” Bapat says. “In the words of John, a project manager with one of our clients: ‘Electromag always delivers its projects on time and the expertise they bring to the table makes it very easy to work with them. For every one project that I have handled, Electromag has handled 10 such projects. I trust them to deliver on time.’”

Quality Control

Electromag prides itself on following stringent quality assurance processes to ensure its design work meets the expectations of its customers. “Our quality assurance checklist has a list of things that the engineer performing the design work will check and then a peer review is conducted by a fellow engineer on our team,” Hiremath explains. “Only when all items in the checklist have been agreed upon by both of our team members does the design get handed over to our client together with our completed checklist.”

When Electromag begins engaging with a client, one of the first tasks it performs is developing a checklist tailored to their requirements. The company is willing to work with clients on several iterations of the checklist until a final is agreed upon by both parties.

Moving forward, Electromag will continue to develop its reputation for helping clients turn around critical projects in short periods of time as a low-cost solutions provider that becomes a value-add extension of the design team. “When everything comes together, our clients reap the benefits,” Bapat says. “Their operations are perceived to have better service levels through us helping our clients by delivering quick turnarounds, higher throughput and high-quality work.”